Open source services provider Sirius Corporation has provided a combination of OpenSource and proprietary software for Ysgol Maesydderwen school, near Swansea.
Funded by Powys County Council, the Welsh school received installation of a new infrastructure, new desktops and laptops for both pupils and staff and 100 iPads for class activities and projects.
Nick Talbot, strategic IT advisor to the schools service at Powys County Council said: "We were delighted with Sirius' proposed solution drawing from the best elements of Open Source and proprietary software.
"We commissioned them to make this vision real, which they did against challenging deadlines and this work has significantly increased the school's ICT confidence and capabilities."
A new suite of specialist desktop applications includes Serif, ProTools and Creo. Active Directory was deployed for the management of desktops and laptops, with files from Samba running on Debian. Inventory management was also deployed as virtual machines running on GNU/Linux KVM.
Free for education use, Google Apps was selected to provide email, productivity and remote file services.
Richard Lashley, deputy head at Ysgol Maesydderwen said any glitches encountered were dealt with professionally: "This enabled the school to have a state-of-the-art system that we continue to refine for the improvement of teaching and learning, and we are extremely excited about the future possibilities."
